I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it and
no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

"David R. Birch" wrote in message
news
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it
and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

The hard part may be matching the reversible 120VAC motor to an
adequate inverter. The pure sine inverter in the solar backup for my
refrigerator draws too much idle current to leave on all the time. You
might need a separate radio-controlled DC relay like a winch control
or remote car starter that you engage first to power up the door
opener.
-jsw

On Saturday, March 11, 2017 at 2:45:07 PM UTC-5, David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it.

David

You are there and know what probems you would have running electricity to your garage. But I would look at what it would take to have electricity in your garage. With power in the garage , you can have radiant heat, a place to work, power tools etc. And if you add solar panels you can feed power from the garage to the house.

Generally if you use a GFI breaker you do not have to bury under ground cable very deep.

Dan

On Sat, 11 Mar 2017 13:44:45 -0600, "David R. Birch"
wrote:

I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it and
no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

Never seen one. But there are AC versions with add-on battery backup.
You could do that yourself with a battery and inverter. Charge with
solar if you use the door enough to warrant that. Eliminate the
phantom load of the operator's safety circuitry by using an older
model, or bypassing the safety on a newer one. Assuming you don't mind
crushing children etc.

My door operators are just one small load I run off a whole-house
backup system, which is mostly an inverter-charger combined with a
pair of large AGM batteries. The wall-mounted operators have little
control panels that take a few minutes to re-charge/boot after any
short outage. No issues with the power supply, which is now
continuous, so no more re-booting. All of the shop lights and a couple
outlets are also powered by the inverter, which is a bonus you might
consider including as part of your door opener solution.

On Saturday, March 11, 2017 at 11:45:07 AM UTC-8, David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk

Well, this is a famous solar powered closer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyoD19q1YQ

I guess it could be scaled up.

David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it and
no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

Shouldn't be that hard. Solar panels to battery bank. Inverter off
battery bank. Just make sure the inverter can handle the load.

--
Steve W.

"Steve W." wrote in message
news
David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it
and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

Shouldn't be that hard. Solar panels to battery bank. Inverter off
battery bank. Just make sure the inverter can handle the load.

--
Steve W.

For an experimental system that may have to be modified I would
isolate its functions instead of trying to integrate them. For example
my P20L solar panel controller will allow up to 20A load current but
my sine inverter can pull 50A, so I can't use the controller's load
output or low-voltage cutoff and depend on the inverter's battery
protection setting.

There are separate fused heavy load cables and lighter charging wires
attached at the battery terminals and the charging wires double for
remote voltage monitoring. I have ammeters permanently in the charging
side and 4-digit voltmeters on the batteries, to keep an eye on how
well the system is working. The voltage drop in the wire and fuse
between the voltmeter and the battery while charging doesn't matter
because the reading won't indicate state of charge until the battery
has rested for quite a while. The voltmeter will accurately show
battery terminal voltage during discharge as long as there's no
charging current flowing.

Solar panel voltage and load current are useful to check during setup
but I don't think they are worth the cost of dedicated meters unless
you have problems or keep tinkering with it. An ammeter in the load
cable will affect the low voltage cutoff.

My system uses non-gendered Anderson Powerpoles to connect the
components and a meter like this can be temporarily inserted to
measure voltage and current.
https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Batte.../dp/B01HM24MVG
The Amp-Hours total is useful on solar systems. It will preserve the
reading if you add a 9V battery to keep it powered through the JST
connector (from an RC hobby store.) Watt-Hours is less useful because
the battery discharges at a lower voltage than it charges.

It's especially important to be able to isolate the always-live
battery. I like to see the plugs hanging free while working elsewhere
on the wiring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
If you are accustomed to 120V wiring the relatively higher resistance
loss at 12V is surprising. 25' of 14 AWG wire pair drops 1.25V at 10A.

In other words you may want the battery very close to the AC inverter.
The 120V wiring to the motor in the center of the ceiling could be
longer and the wiring to the solar panel controller long enough to put
it within reach on the wall. An external port like a weatherproof
trailer connector would let you charge a dead battery to open the
door.

-jsw

"David R. Birch" wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it
and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info

I remember hearing something about an extension cord. Fully install the garage-door opener having a normal plug for a normal outlet (120vac 15-20 amp outlet), though you don't have the outlet. You just plug the plug into an extension cord leading your car's cigarette-lighter outlet adapter whenever you need it. Or you can buy one from any auto parts retailer).

But this won't help when its raining

But then, you could put a remote-start generator in your garage and have the extention cord lead to that for power.

I didn't even realize that power generators and air compressors even had remote start (you know, starting it up from a TV remote that they give you)

On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:30:01 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Steve W." wrote in message
news
David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it
and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

Since solar runs 12-48vdc battery systems and garage openers run at
120vac, it would have to be run on an inverter. I've never seen a
dedicated system for a garage door.


Shouldn't be that hard. Solar panels to battery bank. Inverter off
battery bank. Just make sure the inverter can handle the load.
Steve W.

The inverter would have to be switched, Steve, unless you buy a really
expensive model for over a grand. Cheapies don't like to be run 24/7.
A 100w panel, a single deep cycle battery, a 10A controller, and a
relay to switch on the inverter should do the trick, though. Or
switch on the inverter for the time you're out, as long as the GDO
isn't latching, leaving it in any state when it's shut off.


For an experimental system that may have to be modified I would
isolate its functions instead of trying to integrate them. For example
my P20L solar panel controller will allow up to 20A load current but
my sine inverter can pull 50A, so I can't use the controller's load
output or low-voltage cutoff and depend on the inverter's battery
protection setting.

There are separate fused heavy load cables and lighter charging wires

I went with circuit breakers for this, both in to the
controller/battery and out to the water heater.


attached at the battery terminals and the charging wires double for
remote voltage monitoring. I have ammeters permanently in the charging
side and 4-digit voltmeters on the batteries, to keep an eye on how
well the system is working. The voltage drop in the wire and fuse
between the voltmeter and the battery while charging doesn't matter
because the reading won't indicate state of charge until the battery
has rested for quite a while. The voltmeter will accurately show
battery terminal voltage during discharge as long as there's no
charging current flowing.

Solar panel voltage and load current are useful to check during setup
but I don't think they are worth the cost of dedicated meters unless
you have problems or keep tinkering with it. An ammeter in the load
cable will affect the low voltage cutoff.

By what, 0.3v (a diode drop), Jim? Will a shunted ammeter also cause
troubles like this? What's your depth of discharge, anyway? Sounds
too deep.


My system uses non-gendered Anderson Powerpoles to connect the
components and a meter like this can be temporarily inserted to
measure voltage and current.

Wish I had the good luck you guys seem to with those, but the lone
pair I've used has been trouble 2 out of 3 times I've used it.


https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Batte.../dp/B01HM24MVG

Those are going for $7.54 delivered via eBay sellers.
http://tinyurl.com/hqk98uy

I prefer the better Bayite (plastic box) ones you referred me to that
go for $18 w/ 100A shunt, but have pairs of each for the new system.
I bought 50A shunts for the Bayites @ $5 a pop because my initial 1kW
system will be 37.5A max.


The Amp-Hours total is useful on solar systems. It will preserve the
reading if you add a 9V battery to keep it powered through the JST
connector (from an RC hobby store.) Watt-Hours is less useful because
the battery discharges at a lower voltage than it charges.

Huh? 'Taint a 9v connector.


It's especially important to be able to isolate the always-live
battery. I like to see the plugs hanging free while working elsewhere
on the wiring.

I have 4 (2 in, 2 out) of these for that: http://tinyurl.com/hoptv98


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
If you are accustomed to 120V wiring the relatively higher resistance
loss at 12V is surprising. 25' of 14 AWG wire pair drops 1.25V at 10A.

In other words you may want the battery very close to the AC inverter.

Yeah, 6' or less, please.


The 120V wiring to the motor in the center of the ceiling could be
longer and the wiring to the solar panel controller long enough to put
it within reach on the wall. An external port like a weatherproof
trailer connector would let you charge a dead battery to open the
door.

I'll be running 4ga for the 900W heater element @ 35'.


--
The mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work until it's opened.
--Frank Zappa

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:30:01 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage
Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done
it
and no company that makes one.
...........

I went with circuit breakers for this, both in to the
controller/battery and out to the water heater.

Be careful which Type of low voltage circuit breaker you use.
http://www.wiringproducts.com/atc-circuit-breakers
I looked into them recently for my homebrew 50A battery charger's
output and the advice I found was to use manual reset breakers for the
fastest opening.

The two chargers I assembled from my collection of transformers and
Powerstats have ~0.1 Farad output caps that let them serve reasonably
well as variable power supplies. The caps mainly stabilize digital
meter readings. A series diode prevents big sparks from a surge back
into the cap when connecting to a battery and a shunt diode plus the
fuse or breaker (should) protect the cap from connecting the battery
backwards (dirty battery, dim light), since reversed polarity would
pass through the series diode. Electrolytics are supposed to
olerate -1.5V without damage.

The 50A charger was made from a 50A buzz box arc welder transformer
which has enough self-inductance that the output ripple is only around
1V p-p at 20A. As expected, as current increases the voltage droops
considerably until it hits the normal arc voltage range around 20-30V.
It needs to be watched or run through a solar controller when charging
batteries because the current doesn't taper off as voltage rises.
However it brings them rapidly to the point where I can change to a
smaller charger that does taper automatically. I bought this for when
I need good voltage regulation and current limiting instead of a
bulletproof output.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/1422203...&ul_noapp=true

Temperature rise limits its continuous (1/2 hour) output to 25A at
28V without the fan. With the fan the outside is cooler but I can't
measure internal winding temperature. The 30A NTE panel-mount breaker
passes 50A for about a minute, long enough to measure the voltage drop
across whatever I'm testing.

I use 1A or 10A from it to measure wire resistance to the milliOhm.
Unlike an expensive lab supply the output tolerates abuse such as
inductive kickbacks from motor and transformer windings.

...An ammeter in the load
cable will affect the low voltage cutoff.

By what, 0.3v (a diode drop), Jim? Will a shunted ammeter also
cause
troubles like this? What's your depth of discharge, anyway? Sounds
too deep.

The "burden" of the shunts is 75mV at full rated current.

Since my batteries are only for backup there's no normal depth of
discharge. If I knew how I'd try to get maybe 5 - 10 cycles from a
backup battery, but I wouldn't discharge it that far or leave it there
unless I had no choice. IIRC my laptops are set to warn me at 30%
remaining capacity.

When I test lead battery capacity I draw them down to around 10V -
10.5V at the expected current draw. As the electrolyte depletes their
internal resistance rises and decreases the loaded terminal voltage;
they recover to above 11.5V. The drop is so rapid below 10.5V that
there's little to gain by going lower. You can pull more current from
them later by letting them rest while the electrolyte diffuses.

My system uses non-gendered Anderson Powerpoles to connect the
components and a meter like this can be temporarily inserted to
measure voltage and current.

Wish I had the good luck you guys seem to with those, but the lone
pair I've used has been trouble 2 out of 3 times I've used it.

I use them because my digital meters read current in one direction
only and batteries both charge and discharge. They also disassemble
with a small screwdriver unlike other options. Generally I solder the
inner end, leaving the exiting strands free to flex, then pull-test
the assembly and sometimes check the voltage drop. I have the cheap
imitation crimper and that's enough to make it work. It came from a
flea market and wasn't marked to do Andersons although it had the
right pin numbers so I don't have an on-line reference.

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Batte.../dp/B01HM24MVG

Those are going for $7.54 delivered via eBay sellers.
http://tinyurl.com/hqk98uy

I prefer the better Bayite (plastic box) ones you referred me to
that
go for $18 w/ 100A shunt, but have pairs of each for the new system.
I bought 50A shunts for the Bayites @ $5 a pop because my initial
1kW
system will be 37.5A max.

Metering is a user preference. I suggested my opinion of the low-cost
minimum to detect problems but I have many more on my systems.

The Amp-Hours total is useful on solar systems. It will preserve the
reading if you add a 9V battery to keep it powered through the JST
connector (from an RC hobby store.) Watt-Hours is less useful
because
the battery discharges at a lower voltage than it charges.

Huh? 'Taint a 9v connector.

I think it's a JST connectors used on model airplane servos. The
pinout on my blue 60V 100A Watt Meter is Neg, Pos, Reset starting at
the top. The pin spacing measures 2.5mm.

-jsw

On Sunday, March 12, 2017 at 11:20:41 PM UTC-4, Larry Jaques wrote:


Since solar runs 12-48vdc battery systems and garage openers run at
120vac, it would have to be run on an inverter. I've never seen a
dedicated system for a garage door.


Garage door openers run on 120 vac because that is what is usually available. But for a Solar powered garage door, it seems like changing out the motor for a DC motor would be the only sensible thing to do. Why have a battery system and then use an expensive inverter to run an AC motor, when you can just use a DC motor.

Dan

wrote in message
...
On Sunday, March 12, 2017 at 11:20:41 PM UTC-4, Larry Jaques wrote:


Since solar runs 12-48vdc battery systems and garage openers run at
120vac, it would have to be run on an inverter. I've never seen a
dedicated system for a garage door.


Garage door openers run on 120 vac because that is what is usually
available. But for a Solar powered garage door, it seems like
changing out the motor for a DC motor would be the only sensible thing
to do. Why have a battery system and then use an expensive inverter
to run an AC motor, when you can just use a DC motor.

Dan

=========================

I responded to the solar and battery part of his question without
challenging his assumptions.

Old AC garage door openers are free if you ask around. I have two of
them in the shed. Many new models have DC motors.
http://www.garagehowto.com/quiet-gar...or-opener.html
"Because DC motors require less energy, backup batteries can now be
used to open and close your garage door up to 20 times in a 24 hour
period."

-jsw

On 2017-03-13, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:30:01 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Steve W." wrote in message
news
David R. Birch wrote:

[ ... ]

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

Since solar runs 12-48vdc battery systems and garage openers run at
120vac, it would have to be run on an inverter. I've never seen a
dedicated system for a garage door.

With a bit of re-design, it could be run with a 12V or 24V DC
motor, and a regulator to provide the desired voltage for the
electronics.

[ ... ]

Solar panel voltage and load current are useful to check during setup
but I don't think they are worth the cost of dedicated meters unless
you have problems or keep tinkering with it. An ammeter in the load
cable will affect the low voltage cutoff.

By what, 0.3v (a diode drop), Jim? Will a shunted ammeter also cause
troubles like this? What's your depth of discharge, anyway? Sounds
too deep.

Most older shunted ammeters have a 50 mV movement and a shunt to
assure that at the maximum current, the output is 50 mV -- a lot less
than a diode drop.

My system uses non-gendered Anderson Powerpoles to connect the
components and a meter like this can be temporarily inserted to
measure voltage and current.

Wish I had the good luck you guys seem to with those, but the lone
pair I've used has been trouble 2 out of 3 times I've used it.

If you have the right crimper for the wire you are using (and
there are various sized pins to match, all of which fit the same
blocks), they can be very good. The one trouble which I was fighting in
the power input to a 2-meter transceiver was eventually traced to an
intermittent fuse in an inline holder just upstream of the PowerPole
connector.

Soldering the pins is bad news, however. It makes them rotate
at strange angles in the block and makes for intermittent connections.

[ ... ]

The Amp-Hours total is useful on solar systems. It will preserve the
reading if you add a 9V battery to keep it powered through the JST
connector (from an RC hobby store.) Watt-Hours is less useful because
the battery discharges at a lower voltage than it charges.

Huh? 'Taint a 9v connector.

There is a tiny 3-pin connector lurking beside the input power
cable. (This on my "Turnigy" brand metering module) which says that it
accepts between 4.8 V and 60 V And it is rated to measure current up to
130 A. It constantly displays instantaneous current and voltage, and a
smaller part of the display cycles through a number of readings,
including A-H, peak amps, and several others.

[ ... ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_wire_gauge
If you are accustomed to 120V wiring the relatively higher resistance
loss at 12V is surprising. 25' of 14 AWG wire pair drops 1.25V at 10A.

In other words you may want the battery very close to the AC inverter.

Yeah, 6' or less, please.

Unless you have serious wire available. How much 4-0 wire would
it take to produce the same drop? :-)

The 120V wiring to the motor in the center of the ceiling could be
longer and the wiring to the solar panel controller long enough to put
it within reach on the wall. An external port like a weatherproof
trailer connector would let you charge a dead battery to open the
door.

I'll be running 4ga for the 900W heater element @ 35'.

Better -- but if you really want to minimize drop go for 4-0
wire. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Remove oil spill source from e-mail
Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-13, Larry Jaques
wrote:
On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:30:01 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:


My system uses non-gendered Anderson Powerpoles to connect the
components and a meter like this can be temporarily inserted to
measure voltage and current.

Wish I had the good luck you guys seem to with those, but the lone
pair I've used has been trouble 2 out of 3 times I've used it.

If you have the right crimper for the wire you are using (and
there are various sized pins to match, all of which fit the same
blocks), they can be very good. The one trouble which I was
fighting in
the power input to a 2-meter transceiver was eventually traced to an
intermittent fuse in an inline holder just upstream of the PowerPole
connector.

Soldering the pins is bad news, however. It makes them rotate
at strange angles in the block and makes for intermittent
connections.

Soldering works if done right. I use extra flexible silicone 'noodle'
wire for the short pigtail at the device and don't apply enough solder
to reach the entrance of the crimp barrel. Long, loosely twisted
extension cords have less problem with misalignment. I've had more
trouble with crimped pins than soldered ones. I learned to solder to
NSA standards in 1970.

When I was making electric vehicle cable harnesses the company paid
for the specified crimper. It's less critical on stationary wiring
that doesn't vibrate, just pull-test the pin. A few weeks ago I had a
stranded wire in a 1970ish Maytag motor finally break at the solder
joint. It had been hand-soldered into a tubular rivet that was too big
to strain-relieve it.

There's this:
http://www.westmountainradio.com/pro...ts_id=PWRcrimp
It gives the contact retention force specs. At Mitre we had a jig with
a tension gauge to test aircraft connector pins.
-jsw

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:30:01 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:
.............

I prefer the better Bayite (plastic box) ones you referred me to
that
go for $18 w/ 100A shunt, but have pairs of each for the new system.
I bought 50A shunts for the Bayites @ $5 a pop because my initial
1kW
system will be 37.5A max.

The combination that seems best for me is a 20A internal shunt Bayite
on the charging input and a 100A external shunt one that can go inline
between the batteries and the inverter. The shunt is wired to the same
size and color (= keying) SB 50A Anderson that's in the rear of the
inverter, on both ends so I can measure either discharge or charging
current. It also has 45A and 120A Andersons coming out so I can use it
as an adapter.

I think I mentioned that the 100A shunt is in a (1"?) plastic conduit
tee for protection. It isn't attached because the protruding screw
heads would be hot. The round/square steps and fused current and
voltage sense leads coming out the center hole keep it in place.

The inverter is a UPS that will recharge at 6A when the power returns,
perhaps while I'm asleep. The Bayite seems to just ignore reverse
current and retain the total Amp-Hours from the discharge.

The 20A Bayite and my cheap P20L charge controller work as well with
poorly regulated DC input from the welder power supply run from a
generator, so I can quickly recharge in the morning and don't need
sunshine which can be rare here in winter. If I had bought a solar
controller with more useful readouts I wouldn't need the 20A Bayite.

All my high current Andersons came prewired with short pigtails for
whatever they originally connected to, so I don't have or need a
crimping tool for them and can't recommend one.

I bought the totalizing power meters which are like Kill-A-Watts for
DC to show how much energy the system uses overnight, and how much it
holds overall by running it until the inverter alarms. When they are
nearly equal it's time to replace the batteries. The fridge consumes
approximately twice the energy at 80F in summer (hurricane) as at 60F
in winter (ice storm). I assume I can run a generator for cooking and
other high power daytime demands, like A/C and laundry.

-jsw

On 2017-03-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-13, Larry Jaques
wrote:

Wish I had the good luck you guys seem to with those, but the lone
pair I've used has been trouble 2 out of 3 times I've used it.

If you have the right crimper for the wire you are using (and
there are various sized pins to match, all of which fit the same
blocks), they can be very good. The one trouble which I was
fighting in
the power input to a 2-meter transceiver was eventually traced to an
intermittent fuse in an inline holder just upstream of the PowerPole
connector.

Soldering the pins is bad news, however. It makes them rotate
at strange angles in the block and makes for intermittent
connections.

Soldering works if done right. I use extra flexible silicone 'noodle'
wire

The white silicone insulated wire for HV? Nice flexible stuff.
Used to use it at work a lot.

for the short pigtail at the device and don't apply enough solder
to reach the entrance of the crimp barrel. Long, loosely twisted
extension cords have less problem with misalignment. I've had more
trouble with crimped pins than soldered ones. I learned to solder to
NSA standards in 1970.

O.K. Then you would do it right. I had similar training back
around 1966/1968.

I got a used 2-meter transceiver at a hamfest a while back
with soldered PowerPole connectors in it, and there was certainly excess
solder in that job. And it was augmented by the intermittent 3AG fuse.
(Clip on each end, and soft plastic snapped around it. It was only once
I had replaced all of the soldered PowerPole connectors near it that I
found the intermittent fuse. One cap was unglued, and the fuse element
made contact most of the time, except if you shook the wires. :-)

When I was making electric vehicle cable harnesses the company paid
for the specified crimper. It's less critical on stationary wiring
that doesn't vibrate, just pull-test the pin. A few weeks ago I had a
stranded wire in a 1970ish Maytag motor finally break at the solder
joint. It had been hand-soldered into a tubular rivet that was too big
to strain-relieve it.

Factory work, no doubt. :-)

There's this:
http://www.westmountainradio.com/pro...ts_id=PWRcrimp
It gives the contact retention force specs. At Mitre we had a jig with
a tension gauge to test aircraft connector pins.
-jsw

O.K. Price is reasonable -- a different source (and slightly
different die shape) than mine (from QuickSilver, who tend to sell at
the local hamfests).

The pins from them are two styles. The lower current ones are
cylindrical crimp barrels, while the highest current one is what AMP
would call "Type-F" (flag terminal, where the flags over the wire are
curved to contact the wire end on, and the insulation part (if present)
is formed into a cylindrical strain relief.

But the big problem with the PowerPole pins is that it is easy
to put then in wrong. Unlike nice machined-pin Mil-spec/aircraft
connectors, where it is mostly a matter of having the right tools.

And -- for the PowerPole cylindrical barrel pins, I would really
prefer a for-pin radial indenter crimper to what is provided by the
crimp dies shown at your site, and the ones from QuickSilver. However,
I use the Flag type terminal by preference, if it fits the wire. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
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How much would a 120v or 120-0-120 aka 240v circuit cost to put in ?

This property has 3 power meters. Shop, House, Library.
House and Library share the same 2-phase Power pole. (YES really
2-phase). The street has a full set of 3 phase. Two legs and power
come onto my property.

Martin

On 3/11/2017 1:44 PM, David R. Birch wrote:
I've been think about installing this in my garage which has no
electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar Powered Garage Door
Opener" and only found general talk, no one who's actually done it and
no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

David

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:
.....

Soldering the pins is bad news, however. It makes them rotate
at strange angles in the block and makes for intermittent
connections.

Soldering works if done right. I use extra flexible silicone
'noodle'
wire

The white silicone insulated wire for HV? Nice flexible stuff.
Used to use it at work a lot.

This wi
https://www.amazon.com/12-Gauge-Sili.../dp/B0070RZXLW
The local RC hobby store and a discount store that sells car audio
cable carry larger sizes. I put Andersons on both ends and use it for
extension cables to charge batteries, then cut off short pieces as
needed.


for the short pigtail at the device and don't apply enough
solder
to reach the entrance of the crimp barrel. Long, loosely twisted
extension cords have less problem with misalignment. I've had more
trouble with crimped pins than soldered ones. I learned to solder
to
NSA standards in 1970.

O.K. Then you would do it right. I had similar training back
around 1966/1968.

I got a used 2-meter transceiver at a hamfest a while back
with soldered PowerPole connectors in it, and there was certainly
excess
solder in that job. And it was augmented by the intermittent 3AG
fuse.
(Clip on each end, and soft plastic snapped around it. It was only
once
I had replaced all of the soldered PowerPole connectors near it that
I
found the intermittent fuse. One cap was unglued, and the fuse
element
made contact most of the time, except if you shook the wires. :-)

The fuse cap glue melts if heated. That Signal Corps school made up
dummy fuses with large bus wire inserted but not touching both ends to
teach us to check fuses with an ohm meter. One fuse had GOOD FUSE on a
slip of paper in it, another was blue (= blew). I recognized the
improbability of a 12 AWG wire element in a 3A fuse immediately since
I had a repertoire of similar sight gags and asked the intructor how
to do it, then we watched everyone else pull, examine and replace the
fuses and continue troubleshooting.

The wire in my Maytag's motor was similarly intermittent. I suspected
the timer contacts first and bypassed it with a wash/spin reversing
switch I'd been planning to install anyway but the problem remained.
When I removed the motor start switch board to check for burnt
contacts the wire broke free. Otherwise everything was still in good
condition, considering its 40 year age and that I found it dumped in
the woods. There were two of them and swapping rubber parts fixed this
one.

The symptom of an open Run wire was that the motor drew about 22A when
it failed to start. A good start blipped the analog Amprobe to 40A,
then dropped to 7A. The two-wire DVM resistance of the start winding
is 3.5 Ohms, the Normal and Gentle run windings are around 1 Ohm. The
Relative feature of my UT61E DVM was enough to cancel the lead
resistance to tell them apart.

The automatic controls just interfere with using it with water heated
by alternate energy and poured in. Bypassing the timer and sensors
lets me wash with as little as 5 gallons heated on the wood stove,
though 8 is better. Water may be cheap but the electricity to heat it
isn't. The old non-computerized controls are easy to reconfigure by
moving the Fastons. The schematic is glued to the tub and is easier to
decipher than the relay-ladder-logic industrial controls I used to
design.


There's this:
http://www.westmountainradio.com/pro...ts_id=PWRcrimp
It gives the contact retention force specs. At Mitre we had a jig
with
a tension gauge to test aircraft connector pins.
-jsw

O.K. Price is reasonable -- a different source (and slightly
different die shape) than mine (from QuickSilver, who tend to sell
at
the local hamfests).

IIRC some of my prewired larger Anderson's came from QuickSilver's
hamfest surplus trays.
http://www.near-fest.com/
I haven't found any other high-current connectors that are better
overall than Andersons despite their problems. The EC5 I bought to
make a cable for a Lithium jump starter doesn't disassemble as easily
and is gendered. I need a type where any cable will mate with any
other, sometimes in a Y to insert a current shunt. Most of my ammeters
are one-directional which is fine with power supplies but not
rechargeable batteries.

The other readily available connector that survives the weather well
is the two pin "SAE" bullet connector for trailer wiring. The problem
is that it's electrically but not physically directional, which I
solve by painting a red + on a white patch on the positive side with
nail polish so I don't reverse the power from my solar panel when
plugging in the extension to charge vehicle batteries.

-jsw

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

I got a used 2-meter transceiver at a hamfest a while back
with soldered PowerPole connectors in it, and there was certainly
excess
solder in that job. And it was augmented by the intermittent 3AG
fuse.
(Clip on each end, and soft plastic snapped around it. It was only
once
I had replaced all of the soldered PowerPole connectors near it that
I
found the intermittent fuse. One cap was unglued, and the fuse
element
made contact most of the time, except if you shook the wires. :-)


I've worked with very brilliant engineers who had no business touching
a soldering iron, or a bandsaw. Wood blades won't cut a hardened
lawnmower blade no matter how many times you try after I've just
replaced it. I waited to install the new blade until I needed to cut
aluminum and at least got one use from it. The transmission only
worked in high and I had no budget to order repair parts.

If the perp had dared to fess up I would have cut the blade at home on
my chop saw, without mentioning that they also couldn't drill it. But
burnt drill bits were the stockroom's problem.

-jsw

On 2017-03-15, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

Soldering works if done right. I use extra flexible silicone
'noodle'
wire

The white silicone insulated wire for HV? Nice flexible stuff.
Used to use it at work a lot.

This wi
https://www.amazon.com/12-Gauge-Sili.../dp/B0070RZXLW
The local RC hobby store and a discount store that sells car audio
cable carry larger sizes.

O.K. Not the same. The insulation is a lot thinner than the
wire gauge than what I was thinking about. It was about 16 Ga I think,
and was good up to at least 45 KV -- maybe a lot higher. We used it
with the voltage multipliers we made to power three-stage image
intensifiers. (A lot more current capacity than needed, but good HV
insulation.

I put Andersons on both ends and use it for
extension cables to charge batteries, then cut off short pieces as
needed.

O.K.

[ ... ]

I got a used 2-meter transceiver at a hamfest a while back
with soldered PowerPole connectors in it, and there was certainly
excess
solder in that job. And it was augmented by the intermittent 3AG
fuse.
(Clip on each end, and soft plastic snapped around it. It was only
once
I had replaced all of the soldered PowerPole connectors near it that
I
found the intermittent fuse. One cap was unglued, and the fuse
element
made contact most of the time, except if you shook the wires. :-)

The fuse cap glue melts if heated. That Signal Corps school made up
dummy fuses with large bus wire inserted but not touching both ends to
teach us to check fuses with an ohm meter.

Good idea.

One fuse had GOOD FUSE on a
slip of paper in it, another was blue (= blew). I recognized the
improbability of a 12 AWG wire element in a 3A fuse immediately since
I had a repertoire of similar sight gags and asked the intructor how
to do it, then we watched everyone else pull, examine and replace the
fuses and continue troubleshooting.

:-)

I wonder how they would have liked my 2.2K 2W carbon resistor
with color codes "Black, Black, Violet, Gold" :-) (RC42GF007J)

The wire in my Maytag's motor was similarly intermittent. I suspected
the timer contacts first and bypassed it with a wash/spin reversing
switch I'd been planning to install anyway but the problem remained.
When I removed the motor start switch board to check for burnt
contacts the wire broke free. Otherwise everything was still in good
condition, considering its 40 year age and that I found it dumped in
the woods. There were two of them and swapping rubber parts fixed this
one.

So -- both were found at the same time, and had the problem when
you got them?

The symptom of an open Run wire was that the motor drew about 22A when
it failed to start.

Hmmm ... series combination of the start cap and the run winding
resulting in quite low impedance at 60 Hz.

A good start blipped the analog Amprobe to 40A,
then dropped to 7A. The two-wire DVM resistance of the start winding
is 3.5 Ohms, the Normal and Gentle run windings are around 1 Ohm. The
Relative feature of my UT61E DVM was enough to cancel the lead
resistance to tell them apart.

Useful. My Fluke 27 can do that too, IIRC. But if I really
want good low resistance measurements, I use the rack-mount digital
multimeter from HP with 4-wire resistance capability. (Not very
portable, however. :-)

The automatic controls just interfere with using it with water heated
by alternate energy and poured in. Bypassing the timer and sensors
lets me wash with as little as 5 gallons heated on the wood stove,
though 8 is better. Water may be cheap but the electricity to heat it
isn't. The old non-computerized controls are easy to reconfigure by
moving the Fastons. The schematic is glued to the tub and is easier to
decipher than the relay-ladder-logic industrial controls I used to
design.

Did the schematic document the unused push-on tab functions too,
or did you have to trace out the switch?

There's this:
http://www.westmountainradio.com/pro...ts_id=PWRcrimp
It gives the contact retention force specs. At Mitre we had a jig
with
a tension gauge to test aircraft connector pins.
-jsw

O.K. Price is reasonable -- a different source (and slightly
different die shape) than mine (from QuickSilver, who tend to sell
at
the local hamfests).

IIRC some of my prewired larger Anderson's came from QuickSilver's
hamfest surplus trays.
http://www.near-fest.com/

I've picked up some pre-wired ones a bit bigger than I can crimp
with my present tools -- IIRC, something like 2-0 wire. (I've got the
crimp tools for AMP PDIG terminals -- hydraulicly powered -- all the way
up to 4-0 wire. :-) But the format of the crimp is wrong for the big
Anderson powerpole connectors. Those were not push-in contacts, but
rather unscrew the halves of the connector, insert the wires with
crimped terminals, and then screw together again.

I haven't found any other high-current connectors that are better
overall than Andersons despite their problems.

AMP makes some circular connectors with rectangular blade pins.
6-pin IIRC -- but not weather resistant, and certainly not genderless.
I used those to get power to servo motors from the servo amps on a
Bridgeport CNC conversion.)

The EC5 I bought to
make a cable for a Lithium jump starter doesn't disassemble as easily
and is gendered. I need a type where any cable will mate with any
other, sometimes in a Y to insert a current shunt. Most of my ammeters
are one-directional which is fine with power supplies but not
rechargeable batteries.

Hmm ... do you have the individual pin connectors for the
Andersons? You can dovetail any number together (and a number of colors)
to make weird connectors. And -- if you resist solvent-welding them,
you can split them easily to do things like passing one lead through a
current transformer at need.

The other readily available connector that survives the weather well
is the two pin "SAE" bullet connector for trailer wiring. The problem
is that it's electrically but not physically directional, which I
solve by painting a red + on a white patch on the positive side with
nail polish so I don't reverse the power from my solar panel when
plugging in the extension to charge vehicle batteries.

I remember some really weird weather resistant connectors we
used for plug-in lithium cells designed for Navy use, I believe. A soft
rubber pin (6mm or 1/4"diameter) with two or three metal colors molded
onto the wires, and the connector that they plugged into was open at
both ends, so as you slide it in, it pushes the water out. (I was
working for an Army R&D lab at the time, and I don't know how available
those connectors were to non-military users. Anyway -- not for the kind
of current that the PowerPoles can handle, anyway.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2017-03-15, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

I've worked with very brilliant engineers who had no business touching
a soldering iron, or a bandsaw.

Yes -- most frightening thing is an engineer with a soldering
iron. :-)

I also enjoyed watching them try to use the AMP PIDG crimpers
(22 ga and 16 ga) which I brought in from home. They could never figure
out how to open them -- and I did it with the tool behind by back.
(Just a bit more force to reach the full compression point and toggle to
release. :-)

Wood blades won't cut a hardened
lawnmower blade no matter how many times you try after I've just
replaced it. I waited to install the new blade until I needed to cut
aluminum and at least got one use from it. The transmission only
worked in high and I had no budget to order repair parts.

We had one who kept trying to sharpen a mower blade on the belt
sander -- shredding the belt. Belts were left as damaged, and he had to
try to do it on the 6" disc sander which was part of it. :-)

Also, not very smart around computers either -- but that is
another story.

If the perp had dared to fess up I would have cut the blade at home on
my chop saw, without mentioning that they also couldn't drill it. But
burnt drill bits were the stockroom's problem.

:-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 2017-03-15, Martin Eastburn wrote:
How much would a 120v or 120-0-120 aka 240v circuit cost to put in ?

This property has 3 power meters. Shop, House, Library.
House and Library share the same 2-phase Power pole. (YES really
2-phase). The street has a full set of 3 phase. Two legs and power
come onto my property.

What you have may be the best you can get. You've got 207V
between the two phases. And what you have can be treated as three phase
open delta -- so you can run three phase motors on machine tools.

Is there a particular reason you want 240 VAC instead? Perhaps
something which won't run well on 208V.

If you trade off the current 208V feed for the 240 VAC feed,
they would disconnect you from one of the transformers, and connect you
to an extra winding on the other transformer (assuming that it is
present -- and that there is not enough load on it to preclude it being
used as a 240V single phase feed). If there is, you may have to have a
new transformer installed. And no, I don't know what the cost would be.

An alternative is to get a boost transformer for just the loads
which need 240 VAC and connect it between the two phases which currently
give you 208 VAC. And that transformer you would own, unlike the
transformer on the pole.

Good Luck,
DoN.

--
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Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-15, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

I've worked with very brilliant engineers who had no business
touching
a soldering iron, or a bandsaw.

Yes -- most frightening thing is an engineer with a soldering
iron. :-)

I also enjoyed watching them try to use the AMP PIDG crimpers
(22 ga and 16 ga) which I brought in from home. They could never
figure
out how to open them -- and I did it with the tool behind by back.
(Just a bit more force to reach the full compression point and
toggle to
release. :-)


My AMP 59824-1-L crimper (only $272 from Allied!) has a tab protruding
from the ratchet that allows manual release. It's an old model that
doesn't quite look like this. In fact it's so old that the green
plastic grip covers cracked and fell off.
http://www.alliedelec.com/m/d/7a66dd...0b0c2649ff.pdf
"Cumulative Trauma Disorders can result from the prolonged use of
manually powered hand tools."
You could claim a Trauma Disorder.

I disabled the inaccessible ratchet in my Molex crimpers.

-jsw

On Wednesday, March 15, 2017 at 8:37:33 PM UTC-4, DoN. Nichols wrote:

Yes -- most frightening thing is an engineer with a soldering
iron. :-)

Perhaps more frightening is the fact that one can get all the way through a PhD in electrical engineering without ever touching a soldering iron (or a wire or a breadboard).

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-15, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:


This wi
https://www.amazon.com/12-Gauge-Sili.../dp/B0070RZXLW
The local RC hobby store and a discount store that sells car audio
cable carry larger sizes.

O.K. Not the same. The insulation is a lot thinner than the
wire gauge than what I was thinking about. It was about 16 Ga I
think,
and was good up to at least 45 KV -- maybe a lot higher. We used it
with the voltage multipliers we made to power three-stage image
intensifiers. (A lot more current capacity than needed, but good HV
insulation.

Its cut resistance seems low which makes it easy to strip. I deburr
all metal chassis edges to protect my hands so this wire should be
safe.

That Signal Corps school ...

I wonder how they would have liked my 2.2K 2W carbon resistor
with color codes "Black, Black, Violet, Gold" :-) (RC42GF007J)

Q would have appreciated it.

...Otherwise everything was still in good
condition, considering its 40 year age and that I found it dumped
in
the woods. There were two of them and swapping rubber parts fixed
this
one.

So -- both were found at the same time, and had the problem when
you got them?

Someone dumped several used appliances in the woods where I collected
firewood. After driving past them for a year or so I took a close look
and realized the two Maytag washing machines were similar to the one I
have, and loaded them in the trailer with my log hoist -- they weigh
200 lbs. I finally checked them out last summer when mine developed a
tub seal leak and found that one worked fine except that the rubber
tube to the fill switch had hardened and broken, so the water just ran
out onto the ground. That tube and the Maytag-specific drive belts on
the other one were fine but its timer and transmission were bad.


The symptom of an open Run wire was that the motor drew about 22A
when
it failed to start.

Hmmm ... series combination of the start cap and the run winding
resulting in quite low impedance at 60 Hz.

There's no cap, they use the start winding's resistance to create a
phase shift. If you replace the Maytag belt with one from a hardware
store it won't slip and the tub's inertia will keep the start winding
connected long enough to overheat it. I had the front cover off and
smelled the hot insulation before damage occurred


A good start blipped the analog Amprobe to 40A,
then dropped to 7A. The two-wire DVM resistance of the start
winding
is 3.5 Ohms, the Normal and Gentle run windings are around 1 Ohm.
The
Relative feature of my UT61E DVM was enough to cancel the lead
resistance to tell them apart.

Useful. My Fluke 27 can do that too, IIRC. But if I really
want good low resistance measurements, I use the rack-mount digital
multimeter from HP with 4-wire resistance capability. (Not very
portable, however. :-)

I use a lab supply set to 1.00A constant current. Then milliVolts
equal milliOhms. I can see the voltage drop along the 3/8" aluminum
tubing of a TV antenna, and know when I've scrubbed the connecting
screws clean. For motors and transformers I force the current with one
of my homebrew Variac-controlled battery chargers that don't have
output transistors to zap from the kickback. They'll show the
resistance of a foot of 12 AWG copper wire.


The automatic controls just interfere with using it with water
heated
by alternate energy and poured in. Bypassing the timer and sensors
lets me wash with as little as 5 gallons heated on the wood stove,
though 8 is better. Water may be cheap but the electricity to heat
it
isn't. The old non-computerized controls are easy to reconfigure by
moving the Fastons. The schematic is glued to the tub and is easier
to
decipher than the relay-ladder-logic industrial controls I used to
design.

Did the schematic document the unused push-on tab functions too,
or did you have to trace out the switch?

There aren't any unused functions in the timer. Its schematic is
pretty clear although complex. The motor runs one way to wash and the
other way to spin and pump the water out. The centrifugal pump just
runs backwards during Wash. If a water valve leaks it will start a
wash cycle and then empty itself.

These old "Dependable Care" models that made Maytag's reputation were
expensive to build and didn't upgrade easily to incorporate the new
features the competition introduced.

This shows the two-speed motor.
http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-b...READ.cgi?42826
In low speed the start switch starts with the Start and Run windings,
then switches to the Slow winding. I don't know if that's usual
practice for two speed motors. My DPDT Wash/Spin switch reverses the
red and black wires.
..

Hmm ... do you have the individual pin connectors for the
Andersons? You can dovetail any number together (and a number of
colors)
to make weird connectors. And -- if you resist solvent-welding
them,
you can split them easily to do things like passing one lead through
a
current transformer at need.

I buy bags of pins and housings at the hamfest. This meter has removed
most of my need for shunts and current transformers. It's accurate to
a few milliamps AC or DC.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgea...-uni-t-ut210e/
NCV is the Non Contact Voltage beeper. V.F.C is some sort of
filtration to read switched motor drives more accurately, they claim.

I remember some really weird weather resistant connectors we
used for plug-in lithium cells designed for Navy use, I believe. A
soft
rubber pin (6mm or 1/4"diameter) with two or three metal colors
molded
onto the wires, and the connector that they plugged into was open at
both ends, so as you slide it in, it pushes the water out. (I was
working for an Army R&D lab at the time, and I don't know how
available
those connectors were to non-military users. Anyway -- not for the
kind
of current that the PowerPoles can handle, anyway.

Enjoy,
DoN.

Some of those Mil connectors and tooling were unavailable even to
Mitre. I had to make the special lock nut spanner wrench for a HAVE
QUICK microphone connector.

-jsw

"rangerssuck" wrote in message
...
On Wednesday, March 15, 2017 at 8:37:33 PM UTC-4, DoN. Nichols
wrote:

Yes -- most frightening thing is an engineer with a soldering
iron. :-)

Perhaps more frightening is the fact that one can get all the way
through a PhD in electrical engineering without ever touching a
soldering iron (or a wire or a breadboard).

They had me for all that dirty work. I made an effort to learn the
ways real components deviate from the ideality of their SPICE models,
like self resonance and dielectric absorption in caps and the many
ways op amps don't do quite what you expect of them. In sensitive
instruments or at microwave frequencies those things really matter.
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sboa128a/sboa128a.pdf
Around 1980 I recognized the scope trace of a long-unsolved op amp
offset error as human speech and traced it to an AM radio station 25
miles away. That was worth a promotion.
-jsw

The power company uses only a single line to a single transformer.
The two phase is High Voltage. (Was a Saw Mill here 20 years ago).

The transformer is a 130-0-130 but who is counting.

I have 3 phase 380 in the shop that I generated off the shop panel
in a rotary (220v 3-ph) and six transformers. But that is in the shop.

House wants normal power for electric everything. No gas. Damn.
I'd have to dig several thousands of feet or drag a hose in a trench
and paying for 1200 feet of hose and meter. Gas company declined.


Martin

On 3/15/2017 8:24 PM, DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2017-03-15, Martin Eastburn wrote:
How much would a 120v or 120-0-120 aka 240v circuit cost to put in ?

This property has 3 power meters. Shop, House, Library.
House and Library share the same 2-phase Power pole. (YES really
2-phase). The street has a full set of 3 phase. Two legs and power
come onto my property.

What you have may be the best you can get. You've got 207V
between the two phases. And what you have can be treated as three phase
open delta -- so you can run three phase motors on machine tools.

Is there a particular reason you want 240 VAC instead? Perhaps
something which won't run well on 208V.

If you trade off the current 208V feed for the 240 VAC feed,
they would disconnect you from one of the transformers, and connect you
to an extra winding on the other transformer (assuming that it is
present -- and that there is not enough load on it to preclude it being
used as a 240V single phase feed). If there is, you may have to have a
new transformer installed. And no, I don't know what the cost would be.

An alternative is to get a boost transformer for just the loads
which need 240 VAC and connect it between the two phases which currently
give you 208 VAC. And that transformer you would own, unlike the
transformer on the pole.

Good Luck,
DoN.

On 2017-03-16, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

[ ... ]

I also enjoyed watching them try to use the AMP PIDG crimpers
(22 ga and 16 ga) which I brought in from home. They could never
figure
out how to open them -- and I did it with the tool behind by back.
(Just a bit more force to reach the full compression point and
toggle to
release. :-)


My AMP 59824-1-L crimper (only $272 from Allied!) has a tab protruding
from the ratchet that allows manual release. It's an old model that
doesn't quite look like this. In fact it's so old that the green
plastic grip covers cracked and fell off.
http://www.alliedelec.com/m/d/7a66dd...0b0c2649ff.pdf

A bit newer than mine, which dated back until at least 1965,
which is when I first saw/used them at work.

I think that Tyco still has manual pages online for the older
ones made before they took over AMP. An example -- for blue/green
terminals is 47307. They had a totally enclosed ratchet so designed
that bypassing it would require a complete re-design. (And for mil-spec
projects at that time, if you could bypass the ratchet, you were using
an illegal tool. :-)

The thing used compound leverage, somewhat like the Starrett 5A
wire cutters, and had three hole pairs selected by pins to control the
crimp diameter of the insulation grip.

The one for 10 Ga wire (large Yellow) is called the "heavy-head
crimper", and *is* heavy. It also has the three insulation crimp holes
and the movable pin.

BTW -- while the one for 16-14 Ga is marked with a blue-dipped
handle and a green dipped one, I have never seen the green terminals.
Same for the Black part of the Yellow-Black mentioned in the downloaded
data sheet from Allied.

"Cumulative Trauma Disorders can result from the prolonged use of
manually powered hand tools."
You could claim a Trauma Disorder.

If I used them long enough. But I have pneumatic powered oones
which use the same crimp head -- and most of my crimping is in short
spurts.

Oh yes -- for the heavier ones (8 ga, 6 ga, 4 ga and 2 ga I have
one hydraulic crimper with interchangeable dies, and for the reset of
the heavier ones -- 1-0, 2-0, 3-0 and 4-0 a heavier hydraulic head with
its own set of dies. And I have three ways to power them:

A foot pump sold by AMP.
A hand pump by Enerpac.
and an electric pump sold by AMP.

The two AMP ones have a pressure limit valve or switch set to
about 8,500 PSI, while the Enerpac can go to 10,00 PSI, so I don't use
it normally -- if I can find the crimp terminals in the right sizes. :-)

Acquired from various sources over the decades.

I first saw the foot pump and the head with 4-0 dies being used
for power cables for a flight simulator built into a pair of 18-wheeler
trailers. Power input connector was a four-pin 4-0 connector for three
phase and a safety ground or neutral (not sure which).

I disabled the inaccessible ratchet in my Molex crimpers.

For the pins for the block connectors? I don't blame you. But
the one in the AMP crimpers is set just right. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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On 2017-03-16, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-15, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:


This wi
https://www.amazon.com/12-Gauge-Sili.../dp/B0070RZXLW
The local RC hobby store and a discount store that sells car audio
cable carry larger sizes.

O.K. Not the same. The insulation is a lot thinner than the
wire gauge than what I was thinking about. It was about 16 Ga I
think,
and was good up to at least 45 KV -- maybe a lot higher. We used it
with the voltage multipliers we made to power three-stage image
intensifiers. (A lot more current capacity than needed, but good HV
insulation.

Its cut resistance seems low which makes it easy to strip. I deburr
all metal chassis edges to protect my hands so this wire should be
safe.

One of the things which made Teflon insulation a bad idea in
wire-wrap panels, were all of those square corners were lurking. :-)

That Signal Corps school ...

I wonder how they would have liked my 2.2K 2W carbon resistor
with color codes "Black, Black, Violet, Gold" :-) (RC42GF007J)

Q would have appreciated it.

I would hope so. :-) How about Miss Moneypenny?

[ ... ]

So -- both were found at the same time, and had the problem when
you got them?

Someone dumped several used appliances in the woods where I collected
firewood. After driving past them for a year or so I took a close look
and realized the two Maytag washing machines were similar to the one I
have, and loaded them in the trailer with my log hoist -- they weigh
200 lbs. I finally checked them out last summer when mine developed a
tub seal leak and found that one worked fine except that the rubber
tube to the fill switch had hardened and broken, so the water just ran
out onto the ground. That tube and the Maytag-specific drive belts on
the other one were fine but its timer and transmission were bad.

Obviously crying out to be combined into one fully working one,
and either a pile of parts, or one fully non-working one, depending on
who you wanted to give a hard time to. :-)

The symptom of an open Run wire was that the motor drew about 22A
when
it failed to start.

Hmmm ... series combination of the start cap and the run winding
resulting in quite low impedance at 60 Hz.

There's no cap, they use the start winding's resistance to create a
phase shift.

Oh! Tricky, and saving the cost of the start cap. :-)

If you replace the Maytag belt with one from a hardware
store it won't slip and the tub's inertia will keep the start winding
connected long enough to overheat it. I had the front cover off and
smelled the hot insulation before damage occurred

Good thing you caught it in time.

[ ... ]

The
Relative feature of my UT61E DVM was enough to cancel the lead
resistance to tell them apart.

Useful. My Fluke 27 can do that too, IIRC. But if I really
want good low resistance measurements, I use the rack-mount digital
multimeter from HP with 4-wire resistance capability. (Not very
portable, however. :-)

I use a lab supply set to 1.00A constant current. Then milliVolts
equal milliOhms.

I've used the same trick, set to a limiting voltage low enough
to not fry TTL ICs to find a fault in a card for a MITS Altair 680b (I
think that it was a memory card, but I don't remember for sure these
days.) The fault was a short between adjacent traces (5V and ground)
*under* the solder mask. The local vendor was trying to blame it on his
assembly practices (really well done, BTW), when it was in reality a
faulty board from the factory. (The Altair computers could be purchased
factory assembled or in kit form.) They had others to fix the Altair
8800 (Intel 8080 CPU), but I was the only one for the Altair 680b
(Motorola MB6800 CPU).

I had to scratch through the solder mask and the short to fix
it.

BTW -- the MC6800 had an undocumented instruction dubbed "HCF" (Hang and
Catch Fire) which tri-stated the data buss, and cycled the
address bus through all 64k addresses. Made it easy to spot
problems in address decoding. :-)

I can see the voltage drop along the 3/8" aluminum
tubing of a TV antenna, and know when I've scrubbed the connecting
screws clean. For motors and transformers I force the current with one
of my homebrew Variac-controlled battery chargers that don't have
output transistors to zap from the kickback. They'll show the
resistance of a foot of 12 AWG copper wire.

Also useful.

The automatic controls just interfere with using it with water
heated
by alternate energy and poured in. Bypassing the timer and sensors
lets me wash with as little as 5 gallons heated on the wood stove,
though 8 is better. Water may be cheap but the electricity to heat
it
isn't. The old non-computerized controls are easy to reconfigure by
moving the Fastons. The schematic is glued to the tub and is easier
to
decipher than the relay-ladder-logic industrial controls I used to
design.

Did the schematic document the unused push-on tab functions too,
or did you have to trace out the switch?

There aren't any unused functions in the timer. Its schematic is
pretty clear although complex. The motor runs one way to wash and the
other way to spin and pump the water out. The centrifugal pump just
runs backwards during Wash. If a water valve leaks it will start a
wash cycle and then empty itself.

O.K.

These old "Dependable Care" models that made Maytag's reputation were
expensive to build and didn't upgrade easily to incorporate the new
features the competition introduced.

I wonder what mine is like inside. We got it when we moved into
this house back around 1975.

This shows the two-speed motor.
http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-b...READ.cgi?42826
In low speed the start switch starts with the Start and Run windings,
then switches to the Slow winding. I don't know if that's usual
practice for two speed motors. My DPDT Wash/Spin switch reverses the
red and black wires.
.

Close enough to my year so I've saved and bookmerked the page.

Hmm ... do you have the individual pin connectors for the
Andersons? You can dovetail any number together (and a number of
colors)
to make weird connectors. And -- if you resist solvent-welding
them,
you can split them easily to do things like passing one lead through
a
current transformer at need.

I buy bags of pins and housings at the hamfest. This meter has removed
most of my need for shunts and current transformers. It's accurate to
a few milliamps AC or DC.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgea...-uni-t-ut210e/
NCV is the Non Contact Voltage beeper. V.F.C is some sort of
filtration to read switched motor drives more accurately, they claim.

O.K. Thanks.

[ ... ]

Some of those Mil connectors and tooling were unavailable even to
Mitre. I had to make the special lock nut spanner wrench for a HAVE
QUICK microphone connector.

:-)

Now Mitre could have been a more convenient place for me to
work. There was at least the octagonal mushroom building belonging to
them a lot closer to my home than Ft. Belvoir was. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
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Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-16, Jim Wilkins wrote:
.....


I use a lab supply set to 1.00A constant current. Then milliVolts
equal milliOhms.

I've used the same trick, set to a limiting voltage low enough
to not fry TTL ICs to find a fault in a card for a MITS Altair 680b
(I
think that it was a memory card, but I don't remember for sure these
days.) The fault was a short between adjacent traces (5V and
ground)
*under* the solder mask. The local vendor was trying to blame it on
his
assembly practices (really well done, BTW), when it was in reality a
faulty board from the factory. (The Altair computers could be
purchased
factory assembled or in kit form.) They had others to fix the
Altair
8800 (Intel 8080 CPU), but I was the only one for the Altair 680b
(Motorola MB6800 CPU).

I had to scratch through the solder mask and the short to fix
it.

The semiconductor test equipment maker I worked for pushed the state
of the art and went through a lot of circuit board revisions as a
result. They used layout design rules too tight for the board vendor
to consistently meet so internal shorts were an issue.

20A at 1V usually identified and cleared the short, literally in a
flash. If not, the voltage drops could be followed to locate it, even
in a solid plane. I cleared one by slowly milling down until a copper
chip appeared.. They would complete and test that one board to check
for other problems before sending out another rev.

That was in the first half of the 1980's. By the early 1990's the PC
board vendors had substantially improved their process control and I
had little trouble with shorts despite substantially tighter spacing
rules. They gave me enough detail on the processes to know what I
could likely get away with at standard or higher cost, ie more labor
and lower yield. I've seen a circuit board that cost the Air Force
$30,000 and heard of yields of 1 in 20 for high layer counts.

For example the fiberglass threads deflect a fine drill bit and
determine the amount a pad has to be larger than the hole. They don't
stack the boards as high on a small prototype order so I could use
smaller via pads than would be acceptable in production. The size of
the board also affects misalignment between the drill and the pads due
to uncertain thermal expansion when they press the layers together.
Making power planes a lattice instead of solid and filling unused
spaces helped keep my multilayer boards flat, unlike some other
people's.

BTW -- the MC6800 had an undocumented instruction dubbed "HCF" (Hang
and
Catch Fire) which tri-stated the data buss, and cycled the
address bus through all 64k addresses. Made it easy to spot
problems in address decoding. :-)

I built mine around an 8080 chipset that the company gave me after I
finished the lessons on a microprocessor trainer. The were very
supportive of home study as long as we weren't caught using their
parts to build pirate HBO decoders.

They generated a lot of useful scrap like the 9" square wirewrap cards
I built it on. I had to make a manual wirewrap tool from brass tubing
for their 0.062" square high-current backplane pins.

I used counters for the front panel address registers so it would auto
increment when toggling in bootstrap code. The 8080's Wait signal
could trigger a variable one-shot controlling Ready that decreased the
bus speed to 1/2 - 200 cycles per second as well as single step. It
was very helpful to fast-forward through subroutines, using the
address jump to detect the Return.

I learned enough from it that later I was able to design a
special-purpose DRAM controller IC.

[ ... ]

Some of those Mil connectors and tooling were unavailable even to
Mitre. I had to make the special lock nut spanner wrench for a HAVE
QUICK microphone connector.

Now Mitre could have been a more convenient place for me to
work. There was at least the octagonal mushroom building belonging
to
them a lot closer to my home than Ft. Belvoir was. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

Mitre was a real country club, which is great for the golfers, not so
much for the caddies attending to them. You weren't squat without at
least an MSEE. I got by on the unusual breadth of my practical
engineering experience rather than its rather shallow theoretical
depth.

-jsw

On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

[ ... ]

factory assembled or in kit form.) They had others to fix the
Altair
8800 (Intel 8080 CPU), but I was the only one for the Altair 680b
(Motorola MC6800 CPU).

I had to scratch through the solder mask and the short to fix
it.

The semiconductor test equipment maker I worked for pushed the state
of the art and went through a lot of circuit board revisions as a
result. They used layout design rules too tight for the board vendor
to consistently meet so internal shorts were an issue.

Oops!

20A at 1V usually identified and cleared the short,

It could also clear a buried lead for multi-layer boards,
depending on cross-sectional area. :-)

literally in a
flash. If not, the voltage drops could be followed to locate it, even
in a solid plane. I cleared one by slowly milling down until a copper
chip appeared.. They would complete and test that one board to check
for other problems before sending out another rev.

Fun! Was the board populated before you went short hunting, or
was it checked out first to determine whether there were shorts or
opens?

That was in the first half of the 1980's. By the early 1990's the PC
board vendors had substantially improved their process control and I
had little trouble with shorts despite substantially tighter spacing
rules. They gave me enough detail on the processes to know what I
could likely get away with at standard or higher cost, ie more labor
and lower yield. I've seen a circuit board that cost the Air Force
$30,000 and heard of yields of 1 in 20 for high layer counts.

Ouch! $30K populated, or just the bare board?

For example the fiberglass threads deflect a fine drill bit and
determine the amount a pad has to be larger than the hole. They don't
stack the boards as high on a small prototype order so I could use
smaller via pads than would be acceptable in production.

Solid carbide drills, or HSS? I know that the HHS ones in the
#70 size range were quite flexible, but the solid ones you even bounce
too much light off one side and "plink". :-)

The size of
the board also affects misalignment between the drill and the pads due
to uncertain thermal expansion when they press the layers together.
Making power planes a lattice instead of solid and filling unused
spaces helped keep my multilayer boards flat, unlike some other
people's.

I've seen the latticed power planes and wondered why. One
thought was to minimize weight in avionics. I've even seen them on
plain double-sided boards -- no buried power planes..

BTW -- the MC6800 had an undocumented instruction dubbed "HCF" (Hang
and
Catch Fire) which tri-stated the data buss, and cycled the
address bus through all 64k addresses. Made it easy to spot
problems in address decoding. :-)

I built mine around an 8080 chipset that the company gave me after I
finished the lessons on a microprocessor trainer. The were very
supportive of home study as long as we weren't caught using their
parts to build pirate HBO decoders.

:-)

They generated a lot of useful scrap like the 9" square wirewrap cards
I built it on. I had to make a manual wirewrap tool from brass tubing
for their 0.062" square high-current backplane pins.

0.062" hmm ... the size for the phone company relay pins which
used wire-wrap. I've got some bits for that size as well as the more
common logic circuit size.

I used counters for the front panel address registers so it would auto
increment when toggling in bootstrap code.

That would certainly save time compared to the Altair 680b's
front panel simply with toggles for both the address and data input. I
got pretty good at incrementing binary numbers with the switches. :-)

The 8080's Wait signal
could trigger a variable one-shot controlling Ready that decreased the
bus speed to 1/2 - 200 cycles per second as well as single step. It
was very helpful to fast-forward through subroutines, using the
address jump to detect the Return.

Hmm ... the MC6800 could be halted by the clock to stretch the
cycle for slower chips -- but the Altair 680b did not implement that, so
the whole thing ran at 500 KHz instead of the proper 1 MHz to allow the
1702A EPROMs used for the monitor.

The CPU could be halted as long as you wished by stopping the
clock -- no dynamic memory in it, and if you used static RAM as well, no
problems.

I learned enough from it that later I was able to design a
special-purpose DRAM controller IC.

Nice!

[ ... ]

Now Mitre could have been a more convenient place for me to
work. There was at least the octagonal mushroom building belonging
to
them a lot closer to my home than Ft. Belvoir was. :-)

Mitre was a real country club, which is great for the golfers, not so
much for the caddies attending to them. You weren't squat without at
least an MSEE. I got by on the unusual breadth of my practical
engineering experience rather than its rather shallow theoretical
depth.

Hmm ... I would have had to do the same, then -- if I could.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
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Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
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--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

On 16 Mar 2017 01:24:14 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:


An alternative is to get a boost transformer for just the loads
which need 240 VAC and connect it between the two phases which currently
give you 208 VAC. And that transformer you would own, unlike the
transformer on the pole.

Good Luck,
DoN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck%E...st_transformer


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

[ ... ]
The semiconductor test equipment maker I worked for pushed the
state
of the art and went through a lot of circuit board revisions as a
result. They used layout design rules too tight for the board
vendor
to consistently meet so internal shorts were an issue.

Oops!

I wasn't involved in board layout at that time. We sometimes found the
images of dust and hairs in the copper. The quality of high volume
production boards was better than the quick-turnaround prototypes. The
dreck could have been the company's own fault - they made at least
some of their artworks on a Gerber drum photoplotter in the same room
as the E-size diazo copy machine.

20A at 1V usually identified and cleared the short,

It could also clear a buried lead for multi-layer boards,
depending on cross-sectional area. :-)

Only a few techs were trusted to do it.


Fun! Was the board populated before you went short hunting, or
was it checked out first to determine whether there were shorts or
opens?

Both, IIRC. They ordered expensive GenRad bed-of-nails probe fixtures
to test stable releases but not prototypes.

The product line that had the problems was the digital memory tester
and I was mostly involved with analog IC testing, which didn't have
the wide address and data buses or high speed requirements. They
called me in when no one else could find a bug and then were annoyed
when my fresh eyes located it in 10 minutes.

That was in the first half of the 1980's. By the early 1990's the
PC
board vendors had substantially improved their process control and
I
had little trouble with shorts despite substantially tighter
spacing
rules. They gave me enough detail on the processes to know what I
could likely get away with at standard or higher cost, ie more
labor
and lower yield. I've seen a circuit board that cost the Air Force
$30,000 and heard of yields of 1 in 20 for high layer counts.

Ouch! $30K populated, or just the bare board?

Populated, carefully tuned and thoroughly tested. It was from an
aircraft radar.

For example the fiberglass threads deflect a fine drill bit and
determine the amount a pad has to be larger than the hole. They
don't
stack the boards as high on a small prototype order so I could use
smaller via pads than would be acceptable in production.

Solid carbide drills, or HSS? I know that the HHS ones in the
#70 size range were quite flexible, but the solid ones you even
bounce
too much light off one side and "plink". :-)

Carbide, on an Excellon machine. I wanted 0.019" (IIRC) vias after
plating, the smallest they could guarantee.The drill was smaller. The
design rule required a pad diameter of lets say 0.020" larger, which
blocks several possible routing channels. The goal was to have a
little copper left at the edge of the pad for the worst case of drill
bit misalignment, otherwise the hole wouldn't plate and wave-solder
properly. On hand-soldered prototypes I could fix it.


The size
of
the board also affects misalignment between the drill and the pads
due
to uncertain thermal expansion when they press the layers together.
Making power planes a lattice instead of solid and filling unused
spaces helped keep my multilayer boards flat, unlike some other
people's.

I've seen the latticed power planes and wondered why. One
thought was to minimize weight in avionics. I've even seen them on
plain double-sided boards -- no buried power planes..

Unconnected copper fill in unused areas of the board is there for the
same reason, to balance thermal expansion and contraction. The people
the board houses hire for layout aren't electrical engineers and the
best you can hope for is that they blindly follow the rules you give
them. They may misapply those mysterious sacred rules later, like on a
two layer board that isn't assembled in a hot press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-preg

The "PADS" PCB design program I used was complex and disorganized
enough to need a week or two to learn. The instructors often had no
clue about the electrical issues I asked them about, like RF tuning
stubs and guard rings that their software saw as errors.
https://offlogic.wordpress.com/2009/...ery-very-much/

I did the board outline and component placement for Segway's Balance
Sensor Assembly (gyro) because the design house complained that it was
too difficult.
http://www.rbokdesigns.com/summatives/segway/bsa.html#
The drawing doesn't show that some of the daughter boards with the
gyros on them are slanted, which made automated soldering tricky. The
BSA is shoehorned into the tight space between the motors.

I had to assemble boards another tech designed that were so dished
they would float. They had a nearly solid ground plane for RF filter
cans on one side and only the single traces connecting them on the
other. Unequal thermal contraction of the one-sided copper made them
cup as they cooled, concave on the copper side. They had to be
installed in an empty card cage so I could reach in and push the edge
connector straight.

I had been learning TIG in night school and soldered the
stack-of-dimes pattern around the filter cans.

When I encountered a similar situation later I asked the engineer to
use his patch antenna design program to model a controlled impedance
trace with both a ground plane under it and copper fill on either
side, and gave him the copper weight and thickness and dielectric
constant of the low-loss FR4 board material. It required a picket
fence of vias connecting the two ground plane layers on both sides to
come out to 50 Ohms.

...........
Hmm ... the MC6800 could be halted by the clock to stretch the
cycle for slower chips -- but the Altair 680b did not implement
that, so
the whole thing ran at 500 KHz instead of the proper 1 MHz to allow
the
1702A EPROMs used for the monitor.

The CPU could be halted as long as you wished by stopping the
clock -- no dynamic memory in it, and if you used static RAM as
well, no
problems.

The 8080 is dynamic internally and needs the clock running. It used
WAIT-READY handshaking to extend memory accesses as long as
necessary. A 900 KHz clock was enough for the memory samples the
engineers gave me. I put in battery-backed 6116s and then 2816 flash
ram for the monitor program. My goal was to prove that I'd learned to
design with the components instead of creating a useful computer,
although I did take it as far as writing an editor/assembler until the
8080's lack of relative jumps halted the project.

[ ... ]

Now Mitre could have been a more convenient place for me to
work. There was at least the octagonal mushroom building
belonging
to
them a lot closer to my home than Ft. Belvoir was. :-)

Mitre was a real country club, which is great for the golfers, not
so
much for the caddies attending to them. You weren't squat without
at
least an MSEE. I got by on the unusual breadth of my practical
engineering experience rather than its rather shallow theoretical
depth.

Hmm ... I would have had to do the same, then -- if I could.

Enjoy,
DoN.

Most of their electronic techs had the standard skill set, leaning
toward radio. I had to repeatedly prove I could do more.
-jsw

On 2017-03-18, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

The semiconductor test equipment maker I worked for pushed the
state
of the art and went through a lot of circuit board revisions as a
result. They used layout design rules too tight for the board
vendor
to consistently meet so internal shorts were an issue.

Oops!

I wasn't involved in board layout at that time. We sometimes found the
images of dust and hairs in the copper. The quality of high volume
production boards was better than the quick-turnaround prototypes. The
dreck could have been the company's own fault - they made at least
some of their artworks on a Gerber drum photoplotter in the same room
as the E-size diazo copy machine.

The monster with the ammonia breath? :-)

20A at 1V usually identified and cleared the short,

It could also clear a buried lead for multi-layer boards,
depending on cross-sectional area. :-)

Only a few techs were trusted to do it.

I would hope.

Fun! Was the board populated before you went short hunting, or
was it checked out first to determine whether there were shorts or
opens?

Both, IIRC. They ordered expensive GenRad bed-of-nails probe fixtures
to test stable releases but not prototypes.

O.K. I miss GenRad. They made nice test equipment.

The product line that had the problems was the digital memory tester
and I was mostly involved with analog IC testing, which didn't have
the wide address and data buses or high speed requirements. They
called me in when no one else could find a bug and then were annoyed
when my fresh eyes located it in 10 minutes.

That should be satisfying. Fresh eyes help, and educated fresh
eyes even more so.

[ ... ]

and lower yield. I've seen a circuit board that cost the Air Force
$30,000 and heard of yields of 1 in 20 for high layer counts.

Ouch! $30K populated, or just the bare board?

Populated, carefully tuned and thoroughly tested. It was from an
aircraft radar.

O.K. I was wondering whether it was the low yield at the board
level which accumulated such a high value. Toss in all of those things,
and yes, 30K for a low production board is understandable.

For example the fiberglass threads deflect a fine drill bit and
determine the amount a pad has to be larger than the hole. They
don't
stack the boards as high on a small prototype order so I could use
smaller via pads than would be acceptable in production.

Solid carbide drills, or HSS? I know that the HHS ones in the
#70 size range were quite flexible, but the solid ones you even
bounce
too much light off one side and "plink". :-)

Carbide, on an Excellon machine. I wanted 0.019" (IIRC) vias after
plating, the smallest they could guarantee.The drill was smaller. The
design rule required a pad diameter of lets say 0.020" larger, which
blocks several possible routing channels. The goal was to have a
little copper left at the edge of the pad for the worst case of drill
bit misalignment, otherwise the hole wouldn't plate and wave-solder
properly. On hand-soldered prototypes I could fix it.

Yes, i can see that for automated soldering.

The size
of
the board also affects misalignment between the drill and the pads
due
to uncertain thermal expansion when they press the layers together.
Making power planes a lattice instead of solid and filling unused
spaces helped keep my multilayer boards flat, unlike some other
people's.

I've seen the latticed power planes and wondered why. One
thought was to minimize weight in avionics. I've even seen them on
plain double-sided boards -- no buried power planes..

Unconnected copper fill in unused areas of the board is there for the
same reason, to balance thermal expansion and contraction. The people
the board houses hire for layout aren't electrical engineers and the
best you can hope for is that they blindly follow the rules you give
them. They may misapply those mysterious sacred rules later, like on a
two layer board that isn't assembled in a hot press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-preg

That could explain some of the ones which I have seen, including
a plugin for an Ampex instrumentation amp.

The "PADS" PCB design program I used was complex and disorganized
enough to need a week or two to learn. The instructors often had no
clue about the electrical issues I asked them about, like RF tuning
stubs and guard rings that their software saw as errors.
https://offlogic.wordpress.com/2009/...ery-very-much/

And the software is *always* right! Just ask it. :-)

Were their ways to *force* it to accept what you wanted?

Whoever wrote that web document did *not* like them. I won't
ask if it was you -- the writing styles seem different enough. :-)

I did the board outline and component placement for Segway's Balance
Sensor Assembly (gyro) because the design house complained that it was
too difficult.
http://www.rbokdesigns.com/summatives/segway/bsa.html#
The drawing doesn't show that some of the daughter boards with the
gyros on them are slanted, which made automated soldering tricky. The
BSA is shoehorned into the tight space between the motors.

Ah -- weird constraints. :-)

I had to assemble boards another tech designed that were so dished
they would float. They had a nearly solid ground plane for RF filter
cans on one side and only the single traces connecting them on the
other. Unequal thermal contraction of the one-sided copper made them
cup as they cooled, concave on the copper side. They had to be
installed in an empty card cage so I could reach in and push the edge
connector straight.

Fun -- especially if they really had to reach to the least clear
slot in the cage.

I had been learning TIG in night school and soldered the
stack-of-dimes pattern around the filter cans.

When I encountered a similar situation later I asked the engineer to
use his patch antenna design program to model a controlled impedance
trace with both a ground plane under it and copper fill on either
side, and gave him the copper weight and thickness and dielectric
constant of the low-loss FR4 board material. It required a picket
fence of vias connecting the two ground plane layers on both sides to
come out to 50 Ohms.

:-)

[ ... ]

The CPU could be halted as long as you wished by stopping the
clock -- no dynamic memory in it, and if you used static RAM as
well, no
problems.

The 8080 is dynamic internally and needs the clock running. It used
WAIT-READY handshaking to extend memory accesses as long as
necessary.

While Motorola used the clock stretch control (totally off chip).
In part, since they had the complete 16 bit address bus coming out on
individual pins, instead of the upper/lower byte latch system which
Intel used) they did not have as many spare pins. (And, because of the
static internals, they did not *need* as many.

A 900 KHz clock was enough for the memory samples the
engineers gave me. I put in battery-backed 6116s and then 2816 flash
ram for the monitor program. My goal was to prove that I'd learned to
design with the components instead of creating a useful computer,
although I did take it as far as writing an editor/assembler until the
8080's lack of relative jumps halted the project.

Yes -- another difference between the 8080 and the 6800. (And
the 6809 took the relative jumps and branches to serious extremes, with
the close ones all built into the opcode, and two layers of expanded
ones.

[ ... ]

Now Mitre could have been a more convenient place for me to
work. There was at least the octagonal mushroom building
belonging
to
them a lot closer to my home than Ft. Belvoir was. :-)

Mitre was a real country club, which is great for the golfers, not
so
much for the caddies attending to them. You weren't squat without
at
least an MSEE. I got by on the unusual breadth of my practical
engineering experience rather than its rather shallow theoretical
depth.

Hmm ... I would have had to do the same, then -- if I could.

[ ... ]

Most of their electronic techs had the standard skill set, leaning
toward radio. I had to repeatedly prove I could do more.

O.K. Sounds like I might have been able to do the same,
depending.

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Remove oil spill source from e-mail
Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"David R. Birch" wrote:

I've been think about installing this in my garage which
has no electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar
Powered Garage Door Opener" and only found general talk, no
one who's actually done it and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

What we need is viable solar shingles. That way, we can provide
power solar power for significant stuff. It will be a good way
of keeping the house cool at the same time. Maybe it will mesh
well with global warming...

"John Doe" wrote in message
news
"David R. Birch" wrote:

I've been think about installing this in my garage which
has no electricity running to it. I've googled "Solar
Powered Garage Door Opener" and only found general talk, no
one who's actually done it and no company that makes one.

Has anyone here done this or have more info?

What we need is viable solar shingles. That way, we can provide
power solar power for significant stuff. It will be a good way
of keeping the house cool at the same time. Maybe it will mesh
well with global warming...

Solar City installs their panels flat over the shingles for the same
effect. The other day I discussed adding a rubber edge to a roof snow
rake to avoid damaging them, as the rake needs to be dropped hard to
break through the icy crust one clear day and night causes.

If not removed, on a sunny day the snow slides off the smooth panels
in one big damaging avalanche.

The necessary series/parallel interconnections, control and protection
and the weight seem to determine the practical size of individual roof
panels. Mine are closer to shingle size and wouldn't scale up as
efficiently as larger panels. Solar shingles would be a problem to
maintain if you couldn't walk on or between them.

They use the grid for "storage" unless you buy a Powerwall battery.
The grid will have stability issues if too much uncontrolled input is
connected. Here it already fluctuates enough to turn on the UPS (relay
click & fan) several times a day.

-jsw

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-18, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

O.K. I was wondering whether it was the low yield at the board
level which accumulated such a high value. Toss in all of those
things,
and yes, 30K for a low production board is understandable.

I've built some fairly small custom instruments for which the customer
paid $50,000 or more.

...........
The "PADS" PCB design program I used was complex and disorganized
enough to need a week or two to learn. The instructors often had no
clue about the electrical issues I asked them about, like RF tuning
stubs and guard rings that their software saw as errors.
https://offlogic.wordpress.com/2009/...ery-very-much/

And the software is *always* right! Just ask it. :-)

Were their ways to *force* it to accept what you wanted?

Whoever wrote that web document did *not* like them. I won't
ask if it was you -- the writing styles seem different enough. :-)

The workaround was to draw free-form line items in copper and label
them the same as the net they touched so they didn't trigger spacing
errors (or ignore them).

The progam is powerful and difficult like Excel, with many tacked-on
features and non-intuitive menu paths. I use the free 2007 demo
version as my mechanical CAD program.

When engineers used my CAD workstations they stopped asking questions
after half a day on ViewLogic schematic capture, a week on PADS.

[ ... ]

Yes -- another difference between the 8080 and the 6800. (And
the 6809 took the relative jumps and branches to serious extremes,
with
the close ones all built into the opcode, and two layers of expanded
ones.

[ ... ]

Enjoy,
DoN.

I only went with the 8080 because the company gave me one and expected
me to build a computer with it. The analog test machine I helped
develop ran on a DEC LSI-11 and the memory tester used a TI TMS9900.
The market hadn't settled at that time.

The next places I worked used the MC68000 or the TMS320 DSP family,
for which I designed the custom DRAM controller.

The PIC seemed to be the popular choice for small tasks. It was fun to
play with so the engineers kept that part of the job for themselves
and gave me the boring parts like the backplane and calibration
modules.

The 8080 was good practice for designing small embedded systems
although it was too limited to be a general-purpose computer. I
shifted my focus to learning how to design add-ins for the PCs and
Macs that the lab inherited when the front office upgraded. You can do
a lot with the PC's parallel LPT port.

The Mac was difficult because plug-ins are supposed to have a driver
in ROM at the top of the slot's address block, written by an Apple
Certified Programmer. When I gave him the simple register model for my
16 bit A/D converter he quoted 3 months to write it. Instead I left
the card invisible and generated four lines of 68000 machine language
in LabVIEW to select a MUX channel and read the data when ready.

At that time Mitre allowed only MACs and SPARCs. We needed a note from
Jesus's mother to buy PCs for CAD workstations and then had to run
Novell NetWare instead of DOS on them.

-jsw

On 2017-03-19, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-18, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]

O.K. I was wondering whether it was the low yield at the board
level which accumulated such a high value. Toss in all of those
things,
and yes, 30K for a low production board is understandable.

I've built some fairly small custom instruments for which the customer
paid $50,000 or more.

I can believe it.

The "PADS" PCB design program I used was complex and disorganized
enough to need a week or two to learn. The instructors often had no
clue about the electrical issues I asked them about, like RF tuning
stubs and guard rings that their software saw as errors.
https://offlogic.wordpress.com/2009/...ery-very-much/

And the software is *always* right! Just ask it. :-)

Were their ways to *force* it to accept what you wanted?

Whoever wrote that web document did *not* like them. I won't
ask if it was you -- the writing styles seem different enough. :-)

The workaround was to draw free-form line items in copper and label
them the same as the net they touched so they didn't trigger spacing
errors (or ignore them).

O.K. That makes sense.

The progam is powerful and difficult like Excel, with many tacked-on
features and non-intuitive menu paths. I use the free 2007 demo
version as my mechanical CAD program.

O.K.

When engineers used my CAD workstations they stopped asking questions
after half a day on ViewLogic schematic capture, a week on PADS.

:-)

[ ... ]

Yes -- another difference between the 8080 and the 6800. (And
the 6809 took the relative jumps and branches to serious extremes,
with
the close ones all built into the opcode, and two layers of expanded
ones.

[ ... ]

I only went with the 8080 because the company gave me one and expected
me to build a computer with it.

I can understand that.

The analog test machine I helped
develop ran on a DEC LSI-11 and the memory tester used a TI TMS9900.
The market hadn't settled at that time.

Yep. The TMS9900 was an interesting instruction set, but the
initial "registers live in RAM" model made it rather sluggish, somewhat
improved by finally moving copies of them onto the CPU chip, and only
having to go to the RAM copy if you *changed* the contents.

The subroutine call and return was interesting too.

The I/O was not bad for a single bit width, but the more bits
(up to 16) you used, the slower it got -- one additional cycle per bit.)

Better to go to memory-mapped devices for I/O if you can.

The next places I worked used the MC68000 or the TMS320 DSP family,
for which I designed the custom DRAM controller.

I liked the MC68000 family, but no experience with the TMS320.

The PIC seemed to be the popular choice for small tasks. It was fun to
play with so the engineers kept that part of the job for themselves
and gave me the boring parts like the backplane and calibration
modules.

That sounds normal. :-)

The 8080 was good practice for designing small embedded systems
although it was too limited to be a general-purpose computer. I
shifted my focus to learning how to design add-ins for the PCs and
Macs that the lab inherited when the front office upgraded. You can do
a lot with the PC's parallel LPT port.

Yep -- since it allows addressing sub-sets of the full width.

The Mac was difficult because plug-ins are supposed to have a driver
in ROM at the top of the slot's address block, written by an Apple
Certified Programmer. When I gave him the simple register model for my
16 bit A/D converter he quoted 3 months to write it. Instead I left
the card invisible and generated four lines of 68000 machine language
in LabVIEW to select a MUX channel and read the data when ready.

:-)

Was this after the time the Mac moved to full 32-bit code? I
seem to remember stories of programmers (against the rules) using the
upper 8 bits of addresses as data/flag storage, which caused serious
problems when the full 32-bit addressing was enabled.

At that time Mitre allowed only MACs and SPARCs.

None of the earlier Suns like the Sun-3 using the MC68020? That
should have put your 68K experience to work without the Mac's
restrictions.

We needed a note from
Jesus's mother to buy PCs for CAD workstations and then had to run
Novell NetWare instead of DOS on them.

Ouch!

But in the days before that, at the Army R&D lab where I worked,
you could not purchase anything called a "computer" for use in the lab.
(The exception was the one IBM 370.) So, to get a computer, you had to
call it something like "an instrument controller". :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Remove oil spill source from e-mail
Email: | (KV4PH) Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-19, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-18, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
On 2017-03-17, Jim Wilkins wrote:

[ ... ]



Better to go to memory-mapped devices for I/O if you can.

The 8080 and all its decendants have a separate I/O address space for
the physical hardware registers, which QBasic can directly read and
write.
http://stanislavs.org/helppc/bios_data_area.html

For instance address 40:08 normally holds a pointer to 03F8, the LPT1
port data bit register. The next addresses are the control bit outputs
and the status bit inputs.

That's how the parallel port can drive custom external hardware, but
it works well without OS interference only in DOS. Still, an LCD
screen and keyboard, a GHz CPU and files on a hard drive is waaay
beyond an Arduino.

COM1 and COM2 are similarly accessible at bit-banging level. Plug in a
serial-interfaced DVM and your program can measure voltage.

40:17 and 40:18 show the current up or pressed state of the
non-printing control keys. I checked them when my programs asked the
user to "press any key" and flashed the screen alarmingly when some
joker pressed Shift.



The Mac was difficult because plug-ins are supposed to have a
driver
in ROM at the top of the slot's address block, written by an Apple
Certified Programmer. When I gave him the simple register model for
my
16 bit A/D converter he quoted 3 months to write it. Instead I left
the card invisible and generated four lines of 68000 machine
language
in LabVIEW to select a MUX channel and read the data when ready.

:-)

Was this after the time the Mac moved to full 32-bit code? I
seem to remember stories of programmers (against the rules) using
the
upper 8 bits of addresses as data/flag storage, which caused serious
problems when the full 32-bit addressing was enabled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus
"In order to select the proper device driver, NuBus included an ID
scheme that allowed the cards to identify themselves to the host
computer during startup."

"On the downside, while this flexibility made NuBus much simpler for
the user and device driver authors, it made things more difficult for
the designers of the cards themselves."

Unless we dodged the rules, of course. That may have been why they
couldn't just buy a NuBus A/D converter card from National
Instruments. I wasn't otherwise involved in the project, a 6-port
microwave network analyzer.

The 16 bit A/D worked surprisingly well inside the noisy Mac II
chassis. The least significant bit bounced a little, that's all. I
ran the bus power through high quality Analog Devices DC-DC converters
to quiet it. I tried testing its dynamic response as an audio spectrum
analyzer but only found that the Mac sucks eggs as a real-time data
acquisition system. I had much better luck later generating accurate
timing on a PC running DOS.


But in the days before that, at the Army R&D lab where I worked,
you could not purchase anything called a "computer" for use in the
lab.
(The exception was the one IBM 370.) So, to get a computer, you had
to
call it something like "an instrument controller". :-)


Add LabVIEW and a GPIB card and that's exactly what it is.

My task at Unitrode was to turn any customer's lab computer into an
"instrument controller" to run application boards for new ICs without
modifying it. We did it with an I2C bus adapter that plugged into the
printer port and a floppy or flash drive that boots DOS. I bought
Visual Basic and then discovered it won't talk to the I/O address
space.
-jsw